Blood Is Not Enough Page 11
And the oddest part about “Try a Dull Knife” is that I had written the first two paragraphs sometime in 1963, had written those lines without any idea how they would proceed into a story, and had shoved the yellow second-sheet with those words on it into a drawer, and never went near it, never even remembered it, till 1965. Two years after the opening had been written, I was writing another story entirely. It started with the words “Somewhere back out there, in the night, they were moving toward him, coming for him.” And as I wrote along, the story taking shape slowly, as slowly as was taking shape the realization that I was surrounded by, and being used by, a glittery species of emotional vampires… I realized that I had started the story in the wrong place. I’d begun the yarn at least one beat too late.
And I stopped writing, and without knowing why, I started rooting through that drawer full of odd pieces of snippets for stories that might never be written, that trash-bin of words and ideas that had foundered on the shoals of my lack of craft or insight. I found that yellow second-sheet, and I read what I had written, and I added the word “and” at the beginning of my current project, and … the pieces fit exactly.
The onboard computer was just beginning to learn what it needed to know, back in 1963. But the connection had been made, in 1965, and I learned a lesson I’ve never forgotten:
I trust my talent. Implicitly.
I may be a dolt, subject to all the idiocies and false beliefs and false starts to which we are all heir, but the talent knows what the hell it’s doing. The talent protects itself. It knows it has to exist in this precarious liaison with a dolt, and it makes damned sure the envelope containing the message doesn’t get postmarked to the Dead Letter Office.
“Try a Dull Knife” didn’t get finished till 1968, but the writing of the first pages exploded the scene through which I was sloughing. It freed me, and within a week or so I was out in the open again, moving away from the blasted, creepy world in which I had spent my uneasy days and nights, locked in useless embrace with the vampires who abound in unknowing, innocent society.
“Try a Dull Knife” is a story about bloodsuckers. It is also a story about “luck.”
Harlan Ellison®
VARICOSE WORMS
Scott Baker
The worms in this story drain the energy of their host and are the perfect representatives of their master. The story is also about magic, shamanism, and poetic justice. And it’s a truly disgusting story, so don’t try it before a meal.
Eminescu Eliade’s great good luck had been his last name, that and the fact that not only had he been a cultured cosmopolitan and intelligent man when he’d arrived in Paris (named Eminescu after his country’s greatest nineteenth-century poet by parents who’d seen to it that he had a thorough classical education, he’d almost completed his studies as a veterinarian when he’d been forced to flee Romania as the result of an indiscretion with a rather highly placed local official’s daughter) but that he’d arrived in Paris hungry, practically penniless and desperate. So desperate that when he’d seen a copy of Mircea Eliade’s Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de I’extase in a bookstore window on the rue St. Jacques, where it had been accompanied by a notice explaining that Professor Eliade had returned to Paris for a limited time to give a series of lectures at the Musée de l’Homme under the auspices of the Bollingen Foundation, he’d gone to the post office and spent what were almost the last of his few coins for two phone tokens. He called the museum with the first and somehow, despite his halting French and the implausibility of his story, convinced the woman who answered the phone to give him the phone number of the apartment in Montmartre where the professor was staying, then used the other token to call the professor himself and pretend to a family relationship that had as far as he knew no basis in fact.
His meeting with the professor a few days later resulted in nothing but an excellent hot meal and the chance to discuss his namesake’s poetry in Romanian with a fellow exile, but the fact that he’d found a copy of the other’s book on shamanism in a library and had read it carefully in preparation for the interview changed his life.
Because when, some weeks later, he found himself panhandling in back of the MarchéSt. Germain with all his clothes worn in thick layers to keep him warm and the rest of his few possessions in two plastic bags he kept tied to his waist with some twine he’d found, or sleeping huddled over the ventilation grating at the corner of the boulevard St. Germain and the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie where the hot dry air from the metro station underneath kept him warm, or under the Pont Neuf (the oldest bridge in Paris despite its name) on nights when it was raining and he couldn’t get past the police who sometimes made sure no one got into the Odéon metro station without a ticket—in the weeks and months he spent standing with his fellow clochards sheltered from the wind against the urine-stained stone of the Église St. Sulpice, yelling and singing things at the passersby, or in alleyways passing the cheap red wine in the yellow-tinged green bottles with the fat stars standing out in bas-relief on their necks back and forth—he slowly came to realize that certain of his companions were not at all what they seemed, were in fact shamans—urban shamans—every bit as powerful, as fearsome and as wild as the long-dead Tungu shamans whose Siberian descendents still remembered them with such awe. Remembered them only, because long ago all the truly powerful shamans had left the frozen north with its starvation and poverty for the cities where they could put their abilities to better use, leaving only those whose powers were comparatively feeble or totally faked to carry on their visible tradition and be studied by scholars such as Professor Eliade.
And from his first realization of what he’d found and what it meant, it hadn’t taken him all that long to put the knowledge to use and become what he’d been now for more than fifteen years: an internationally known French psychiatrist with a lucrative private practice in which the two younger psychiatrists with whom he shared his offices on avenue Victor Hugo were not his partners but his salaried employees. The diplomas hanging framed on his wall were all genuine despite the fact that the name on them—Julien de Saint-Hilaire—was false and that the universities in Paris and Geneva and Los Angeles that had issued them would have been appalled to learn just what he’d actually done to earn them. He had a twenty-two-room apartment in a private hotel overlooking the Parc Monceau that even the other tenants now thought had been in his family since the early sixteen hundreds, maids who were each and every one of them country girls from small villages in the provinces as maids were traditionally supposed to be, and a very beautiful blond-haired American wife, Liz, in her early twenties, who’d been a model for Cacharel before he’d married her and convinced her to give up her career.
He took two, and sometimes three, month-long business trips every year, leaving the routine care of his patients during his absences to Jean-Luc and Michel, both of whom were talented minor shamans though neither of them was as yet aware of just what it was that they did when they dealt with patients.
Last fall, for example, he’d left them with the practice while he attended a psychiatric congress in San Francisco where he and his fellow psychiatrists—or at least that sizable minority among them who were, like himself, practicing shamans—had gotten together in a very carefully locked and guarded auditorium, there to put on their shamanizing costumes so they could steal people’s souls and introduce malefic objects into their bodies, thus assuring themselves and their less aware colleagues of an adequate supply of patients for the coming year. He’d learned quite a bit about the proper use of quartz crystals from two young aboriginal shamans attending their first international congress, but had done as poorly as usual in the competitions: The very gifts that made him so good at recovering souls no matter how well his colleagues hid them made it difficult for him to recognize those hiding places where they in turn would be unable to discover the souls he hid. But he’d had a good time drinking Ripple and Thunderbird and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine from stained paper bags on street c
orners and in Golden Gate Park, where he and most of the other psychiatrists attending the congress had slept when the weather permitted, and by the time he’d returned to Paris Liz had lost all the weight she’d put on since the trip before.
But it was almost the end of March now, time to start readying himself for his next month-long separation from her and from his comfortable life as Julien de Saint-Hilaire. He had to retrieve the lost, strayed, and stolen souls of those he intended to cure, and damage or find new hiding places for the souls of those patients he intended to retain for further treatment.
And besides, Liz was starting to get fat again. It was a vicious circle: They both loved to eat but she couldn’t keep up with him without putting on weight, and the fatter she got the more insecure she felt about her appearance, so the more she ate to comfort herself. She was already back to the stage where she was sneaking out to eat napoleons and lemon tarts and exotic ice creams and sherbets in three or four different tea salons every afternoon, doing it all so surreptitiously that if he didn’t know beforehand where she was planning to go, it could take him a whole afternoon of searching to catch up with her; in another month or so she’d be getting worried enough to start looking to other men for reassurance again.
And that was something he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, allow. He had very precise plans for his heir, a boy whose soul was even now undergoing its third year of prenatal preparation in one of the invisible eagle’s nests high up on the Eiffel Tower where since the turn of the century the most powerful French politicians and generals had received the training and charisma and made the contacts necessary to ready them for their subsequent roles. And after all the years he’d spent readying Liz to bear his son he wasn’t going to let her negate his efforts with another man’s seed. She had her pastries, her wines, cognacs, and sleeping pills, her clothing and her restaurants, her money and her social position, and she’d have to stay content with them for at least the next four years, until his son was born.
On the way to his office he stopped off at his second apartment. It was a one-room windowless garret on the rue de Condé that had obviously been somebody’s attic at one time. It now boasted a tiny brick fireplace and chimney that he’d fitted with an elaborate and deadly labyrinth which enabled him to enter and leave as a bird without permitting entrance by any other shamans. He picked up some of the pills he kept for Liz. His supply was almost exhausted: He’d have to write the old Indian in Arizona (John Henry Two Feathers Thomas Thompson, whose father had toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show before starting his own medicine show with a white barker for a front) again and get some more.
He put on his two caps—for something as trivial as what he was about to do he didn’t really need the power the rest of is costume would have provided him with—and became a pigeon with orange eyes and naked pink legs. He negotiated the chimney maze, making sure the spirits who guarded it recognized him in the form he’d adopted, to emerge on the roof and fly back to his apartment overlooking the Pare Monceau. He and Liz had been up very late making love the night before, with only a brief pause at two in the morning for the cold buffet he’d had his catering service prepare them, and she was still asleep, even snoring slightly in the way she did when she’d had too much to drink or had taken too many sleeping pills the night before, all of which made things easier for him. As did the fact that he’d left the cage with the two mynah birds in it covered when he’d left the apartment. Liz had bought the birds at the Sunday bird market on the Île de la Cité while he’d been away on his last trip and the birds had never learned to tolerate his presence in any of the forms he took. But though they were alert enough to detect the fact that he wasn’t what he seemed to be as either a bird or a man, they were too stupid to realize that despite their dark cage the night was over. So he didn’t have to worry about the birds making enough noise to awaken Liz.
He slipped in through the window he’d left open in the master bedroom, plucked Liz’s sleeping soul from her body and bruised it with his beak in a way he knew from experience would do her no lasting harm but which would give her migraines for the next few weeks. Then he returned her still-sleeping soul to her body and flew back to his garret, where he took off his caps and locked them away in the sky-blue steel steamer trunk he kept them in. He sprayed his hair with a kerosene-smelling children’s delousing spray, to take care of the head-lice that made their home in the inner cap, then used a dry shampoo to get rid of both the spray and the smell from the cap itself. He finally locked the door behind him, making sure when he did so that the spirits guarding the apartment would continue to deny entry to anyone but himself, then went back down the five flights of stairs as Julien de Saint-Hilaire, checked with the concierge a moment, and caught a taxi to his office.
He checked with Jean-Luc and Michel when he arrived, but found that except for a matter concerning a long-time patient who was now more than a year behind on his bills and who showed no signs of being ready to pay (which wasn’t their responsibility, anyway), they had everything more or less under control. Too much under control, even: Jean-Luc especially was doing those patients he worked with more good than Eminescu wanted them done, but there was no way to get the younger psychiatrist to stop curing them without explaining to him the true nature of his profession and just what it was he was really doing to get the results he was getting, and that was something Eminescu was not yet ready to let him know; perhaps in another twenty or twenty-five years, when he himself would have to begin thinking about conserving his force.
He sat down behind his desk, pretended to busy himself with one patient’s case history while he thought about what to do to that patient who was refusing to pay and waited for Liz to phone him.
The call came perhaps half an hour later. She said she’d just awakened and all she could think about was how soon he was going to be going away, and did he know yet exactly when he was going to have to leave for Japan? He told her he’d received confirmation on his flights, and that he’d be leaving in another six days, on a Monday, very early in the morning. She told him that she had an awful headache, it had started as soon as she’d awakened and realized he was going to be leaving, and she asked him to bring her something for the pain, since it was obviously his fault she had the headache because he was going away and she always felt sick and tired and alone and unhappy whenever he left her for more than a few days. He said he’d bring her some of the painkillers he’d given her the last time, the ones that didn’t leave her too groggy, and she said, fine, but try to make them a little stronger this time, Julien, even if they do make me a bit groggy. He said he would, but that if she was really feeling that bad perhaps it would be better if he came home early, he could cancel all his afternoon appointments. She said, no, that wouldn’t be necessary, but if he’d meet her for lunch he could give her the pills then, she’d pick out the restaurant and make the reservations, come by to pick him up when it was time. About one o’clock?
He said that one o’clock would be perfect. When she arrived he gave her the first two of the old Indian’s pills, and on the way to the restaurant soothed her headache. For that he didn’t even need his caps, he had enough power left over from just having worn them earlier.
It was an excellent restaurant near the Comédie FranÇaise, on rue Richelieu, and he was enormously hungry—flying demanded a great deal of energy; the iron with which his bones had been reinforced and tied together after his initiatory dismemberment was heavy and hard to lift when he was a bird, for all that the iron-wrapped bones gave him the vitality and endurance of a much younger man when in human form—and both he and Liz enjoyed their meal. Afterward he dropped her off outside Notre Dame (where she had to meet some friends of her aunt’s whom she’d been unable to get out of promising to show around), then went back to his apartment on the rue de Condé and put on his entire costume: the raccoon-skin cap with the snap-on tail that John Henry had given him and which he kept hidden under the over-large shapeless felt hat, the greasy fal
se beard and hair (though in one sense they weren’t really false at all, since they and the skin to which they were still attached had both been at one time his: more of the old Indian’s work), the multiple layers of thermal underwear he wore under the faded work blues that were in turn covered by the old brown leather military trench coat with the missing buttons and half the left sleeve gone, the three pink plastic shopping bags from Monoprix filled with what looked like rags, but weren’t, and the two pairs of crusted blue socks he wore under his seven-league work shoes (the ones he had specially made for him in Austria to look as though they were coming apart), so he could trace the pills’ progress through Liz’s system, and help them along when and if necessary.
It was raining by the time he’d completed his preparations and had begun beating his tambourine and hopping up and down, but he didn’t feel like doing anything major about the weather even though he’d planned to go home as a pigeon again. So by the time he arrived back at the apartment he was very wet. But that gave him an excuse to remain perched there on the bedroom windowsill, ignoring the nasty looks the mynah birds were giving him while he ruffled his feathers and looked indignant.
Liz had already gotten rid of her aunt’s friends, as he’d been sure she would; she was on the phone again, trying to find someone to go tea-salon hopping with her for the rest of the afternoon. She was having trouble: Very few of her woman friends could keep up with her pastry and sweets consumption and still look the way that Liz demanded the people she was seen with look, while Eminescu had for several years now made a practice of discouraging any and all of her male friends, even the homosexuals, who showed any tendency to spend too much, or even too attentive, time with her.
Not, of course, that he’d ever done so in any way that either Liz or her admirers could have ever realized had anything to do with her husband. The men in question just always had something go horribly wrong when they were with her—sudden, near fatal attacks of choking or vomiting; running into old wives or girlfriends they’d abandoned pregnant; being mistaken for notorious Armenian terrorists or Cypriot neo-nazi bombers by the CRS and so ending up clubbed unconscious and jailed incommunicado; other things of the same sort—with the result that Liz never had any fun with them, and began avoiding even those few hyper-persistent or genuinely lovestruck victims who kept trying to see her anyway.